Celtic Languages

An Indo-European language is family of languages with the greatest number of speakers, spoken in most of the Europe and areas of the European settlement and in much of southwestern and southern Asia. They hey are descendent from a single unrecorded language believed to be spoken more than 5000 years ago, and have to split into a number of dialects by 3000 BC. Carried by migrating tribes to Europe and Asia, these developed over times into separate languages. Suggestions of similarities between Indian and European languages began to be made by European visitors to India in the sixteenth century. In 1583 Thomas Stephens an English Jesuit missionary, noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. In 1585 Fillipo Sassetti, a Florentine merchant who traveled to Indian subcontinent and was among the first European observers to study Sanskrit, noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. Unfortunately neither Stephens’ nor Sassetti’s observations led to any further scholarly inquiry. In 1647 Dutch Markus Zeurius Von Boxhorn noted the similarity among the Indo-European languages, and supposed the existence of a primitive common language. The study of Indo-European began in 1786 with Sir William Jones’s proposal that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Persian were all derived from a “common source”. In the 19th century linguists added other languages to the Indo-European family. Porto-Indo-European is hypothetical mother-tongue of all the Indo-European languages. Porto-Indo-European (PIE) has been partially reconstructed via identification of roots common to its descendants and analysis of shared grammatical patterns. The vocabulary of PIE allows anthropologists to make a pretty educated guess as to the homeland of the Indo-Europeans somewhere in Southwest Asia, perhaps on the steppes of Volga. Indo-European is divided into two groups, a...